A survivor's story inspires an ambitious Cambodian opera -- In Lowell
April 22, 2007
By Catherine Foster,
Boston Globe Staff
LOWELL -- The opera begins with the haunting cry of a buffalo horn. Then one of Cambodia's master singers, Ing Sithul, begins to intone a love story in Khmer, a romance about a Cambodian-American rock producer who returns to his native land and falls in love with a pop/karaoke singer.
The tale spins out through a mix of Eastern and Western sounds: a 12th-century Cambodian pin peat ensemble of traditional instruments and gongs, a Western string quartet from the New England Orchestra , 12 Southeast Asian singers, and a blazing Cambodian rock band.
They're all gathered in a room at Lowell High School for a rehearsal of "Where Elephants Weep," the first known contemporary Cambodian opera. Preview performances start here Thursday.
The location is important. Lowell is home to the second-largest Cambodian population in the United States, and the opera will be sung in English as well as Khmer, with surtitles in both languages. The world premiere will take place next January in Phnom Penh.
The arrival of "Where Elephants Weep" in Lowell is a journey of both tragedy and hope, and one that has involved a cross-cultural collaboration among many people behind the scenes -- the Mekong meets the Merrimack.
The opera is loosely inspired by the life of Cambodian refugee Arn Chorn-Pond, who grew up during the horrific reign of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge . From 1974 to 1979, two million people were killed or starved to death in Cambodia, including 90 percent of the artists.
Born in 1966, Arn Chorn grew up in a family of theater artists, most of whom were killed. In a child labor camp, he and other young boys were taught to play traditional Khmer instruments so they could perform propaganda songs. His ability on the flute impressed the authorities and spared his life. When Vietnam invaded, he was forced into the military, but escaped to Thailand, where he ended up in a refugee camp. In 1980, he and several other children were adopted by Peter Pond, a Unitarian-Universalist minister from New Hampshire.
Slight and radiant at 41, Arn Chorn-Pond greets the musicians assembled for the rehearsal. He's the founder and international spokesman for Cambodian Living Arts, a Lowell-based group devoted to preserving traditional arts in Cambodia and the United States.
As the musicians warm up, he talks about how, after moving to Lowell, he worked with Cambodian gang members and street kids. "I was trying to get them working on Cambodian traditional musical instruments [along] with their hip-hop," he says.
In the mid-'80s, he met John Burt , now the executive producer of the opera, with whom Chorn-Pond created Cambodian Living Arts. The two had much in common: Burt was producing director of a theater and leading a national tour of youths telling stories about living in the nuclear age. Chorn-Pond was working on a project called Children of War that had children tell their stories of growing up in wartime.
In 1996, Chorn-Pond went back to Cambodia to see what had happened to his relatives. "I found out that my whole family was slaughtered and starved to death," he says, in a matter-of-fact manner that suggests he's told his story many times. "But I met the master who had taught me how to play the flute during the Khmer Rouge time. He survived Pol Pot. When I came back, I told the kids, 'We need to carry on our culture.' 'What culture?' they said."
In Cambodia, Chorn-Pond and Burt tracked down surviving musicians, including Chorn-Pond's original flute teacher, and established schools. Now Chorn-Pond lives in Cambodia, where he oversees 20 master teachers, operating out of 10 provincial centers, teaching 500 students to play traditional instruments. A PBS documentary, "The Flute Player," tells about his life and work.
"In Cambodia, the Western influence is so strong," Burt says quietly as the rehearsal continues. "It's overriding ancient forms. How do you teach young people to use their own techniques? It was part of our mission to inspire new forms of expression through traditional forms so young people could create work in present day with roots in their traditional culture."
Burt wanted to create an opera loosely based on the experiences of Cambodian-Americans like Chorn-Pond, returning home to seek their cultural roots. He needed a librettist to help give structure to his concept, and he found Catherine Filloux , a Canadian-born librettist living in New York City, who's been writing plays about Cambodia for 15 years.
Filloux took Burt's outline and, blending it with a Cambodian Romeo and Juliet story, thrust the drama into present-day New York. Here a Cambodian-American rock producer, Sam, after escaping the killing fields, has become hard-bitten and spiritually desiccated. His best friend convinces him to spend some time in a monastery in Cambodia. That's a time-honored tradition that Cambodian boys do in honor of their ancestors -- a practice that for many was interrupted by the war. While at the monastery, Sam sings for a visiting family and falls in love with one daughter, a singer.
"The music mirrors the tension in their romance and the tension between East and West cultures," says Burt, now chairman emeritus of CLA.
Burt brought the Cambodian-born, Russian-educated composer Him Sophy, a professor of music at Phnom Penh's Royal University of Fine Arts and Royal Academy of Cambodia, into the project. Him has his own personal connection to the story being told: His musical studies were interrupted by the Khmer Rouge regime, which sent him to a labor camp.
The composer comes from a family of Cambodian musicians, but he was the first to be trained in Western music. When he was hired, he wondered what genre to use for the opera. Western classical didn't seem quite right for this Cambodian love story.
"It's new for everybody, not only in Cambodia," Him says. "I'm proud of myself that we chose a rock band and traditional instruments. And the string quartet is good, it adds colors. I think for the youth, especially in Cambodia or Southeast Asia, I believe they're interested in rock bands combined with traditional instruments. The two together make something more new, more modern."
Burt says they'd hoped to cast all Cambodian singers, but found that most were trained orally and did not read music, and few had experience with Western musical styles. So they hired two Khmer singers and others from the Philippines, Thailand, and Japan. "We blind-cast for the best singers in the Asian communities for the roles," says Burt. "It will be interesting to see how the Cambodian community here responds."
Members of Lowell's Angkor Dance Troupe, one of the oldest Cambodian arts institutions in the United States, have also taught traditional Khmer dance forms to the opera company. Choreographer Seán Curran, with opera director Victor Moag, will integrate many of these dance movements into the modern staging.
Another prime mover in the project is Kay George Roberts , a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and the founder and music director of the New England Orchestra (see sidebar below). She was planning to conduct it as well, but announced earlier this month that injuries sustained during a visit to Cambodia in November were making it impossible to both conduct and keep up her teaching load. Music director Scot Stafford, a California-based composer, has stepped in to conduct in her stead.
Roberts has long been an advocate for overlooked and new music and was particularly interested in presenting a work that would relate to Lowell's large ethnic population. When she heard through the CLA newsletter that this work was going to be performed in Cambodia and the United States, she contacted Burt to press her case to stage the opera in Lowell instead of a larger city like Boston or New York. To make that happen, Roberts pulled together an unprecedented public-private partnership, including universities, schools, the city, community foundations, and local Cambodian cultural organizations.
"We were going to do the original previews in Cambodia," says Burt, "but Kay persuaded me to meet the cultural leaders in Lowell to consider the strong arguments for building it here. We reversed our plan and made the decision to come here. It made sense to reverse the development; the resources are more abundant in the US."
Roberts and CLA are using this as an opportunity to strengthen cultural links between Cambodia and Lowell. Some of the Cambodian musicians, the librettist, and the composer have led informal workshops at Lowell High School and nearby universities.
Roberts even had the Cambodian musicians bring over extra traditional instruments for a pin peat ensemble she's establishing at Lowell's Mogan Cultural Center , where the Angkor Dance Troupe , a sponsor of the opera, is based.
"This is my dream," Chorn-Pond says. "Now we can help save Cambodian culture in Lowell. Like it or not, I'm Cambodian-American, that's who I am. I like to express it out and make it work. And it's working!" he laughs.
Catherine Foster can be reached at foster@globe.com.
